I have no problem when an action movie cranks it up to 11. The problem is when an action movie STARTS cranked up to 11 is that there’s nowhere for it to really go. If the action lets up, the audience feels letdown, and if the action remains breakneck for too long, it can feel like a pain in the neck. Luckily, director David Leitch keeps the momentum going at a zippy clip for much of the running time.
Bullet Train feels like a throwback to those post-Tarantino post-Ritchie crime movies full of colorful hitmen who make pop culture references (mostly Thomas the Tank Engine), have lots of flashbacks, go by cheesy codenames (like “The Hornet”), and are introduced alongside an onscreen title card so you can try to keep up with all the assorted riffraff and miscreants that populate the film. As far as these things go, it’s pretty entertaining, thanks in part to the wild action and bloody mayhem (most of which takes part inside the titular train).
The biggest buoy that keeps things afloat is the game cast. Aaron-Taylor Johnson and Brian Tyree Henry are fun as a team of brothers who go by fruity codenames. Andrew Koji lends some dramatic depth to the proceedings as a father performing a hit in order to save his son. Although most of the characters feel like they came out of entirely different films, any movie that features Michael Shannon as an insane Russian Mob boss/samurai is my kind of picture.
It's Brad Pitt who holds it all together as the goofy, bumbling hitman, Ladybug. With a film populated with so many eccentric oddballs, you need a character like this as a sort of palette cleanser. He has a cool, laidback quality that may remind you of his roles in The Mexican and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and his Zen philosophy towards being a hitman often gets some of the biggest laughs. There are also some great cameos along the way (which I wouldn’t dream of spoiling) that help keep the sometimes overly chaotic flick from flying off the tracks (literally and figuratively).
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